Display caption

Turner's final exhibits at the Royal Academy were four pictures of Dido and Aeneas. According to his housekeeper he worked on all four paintings 'in rotation.'

This canvas is the third in the series. In the foreground are Dido, Queen of Carthage (in white) and Aeneas (in red), accompanied by Cupid in disguise. They are visiting the tomb of Dido's husband, Sychaeus, in the hope that his memory might restrain her fatal passion for Aeneas. Turner showed the picture
with a line from his poem, The Fallacies of Hope: 'The sun went down in wrath at such deceit.'

Jerrold Ziff has pointed out that Turner probably took this incident from Dryden's translation of Ovid's Epistles: Dido to Æneas.

The Times for 4 May 1850 asked ‘what tomb?’ and indeed there is no description of such a visit in Virgil, though Dido does take Æneas to see how the building of Carthage is progressing. The reference is presumably to the tomb of Dido's husband, Sychaeus, in whose memory she tried to control her love for Æneas; Turner had shown the tomb in his picture of Dido building Carthage, exhibited in 1815 (see No. 131 [N00498]). The two figures of Dido and Æneas, on the left, are accompanied by Cupid, substituting for Ascanius as in No. 429 [N00553]. For contemporary reviews of this picture see No. 429 [N00553].

Published in:Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984